Dwelling in Discomfort: On the conditions of listening in settler colonial Australia

While critical scholarship on listening as a political practice has flourished in recent years, there remains much work to do on theorising listening as a situated practice in specific contexts, including as a practice that might unsettle settler-colonial relations. In this paper, we extend Bickford’s (1996) work on political listening and our own theorisation of situated listening to offer provisional thoughts on the generative potential of refusal, discomfort, attunement and yielding – prompted by the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart and the broader conditions of listening and being heard in settler colonial Australia. We locate listening within a decolonial framework to extend and unsettle conventional liberal democratic and deliberative modes of listening. First, we argue it is vital to listen to First Nations histories and practices of refusal. Next, we offer attunement to register our differently situated listening positions within colonial networks of privilege and power. Third, we explore the transformative potential of yielding to First Nations’ authority to set the terms, frames and limits of being heard – within, against, and beyond liberal democratic frameworks. Finally, we offer dwelling in discomfort as a location from which to build more just futures, with the sovereignty of First Nations people placed at its heart.